Bedtime Story
by ebi pers
Summary: Maddy tells her daughter a bedtime story about her and Mark. Futurefic, rated "T" for a bit of innuendo at the end. Please enjoy and review!


**A/N: I just watched the season finale again on Hulu. I just can't get enough of it! And then I was reminded how much I love Mark and Maddy. I'm not obsessive (eyes move around room suspiciously)! I just stalk the show's stars on Twitter! Anyway, in all seriousness I had to make another Mark/Maddy married fic with our favorite little daughter Adelaide! Sorry to keep jumping around with her age but I figured the best way to capture their family would be in the ordinary moments of life. And on an unrelated note my story "In His Footsteps," which is completely unrelated to anything else I've written in this fandom (everything else has some amount of continuity to it), is giving me second thoughts. I have reservations about pushing on with such a sad story so any ideas/advice/thoughts on that would be much appreciated in a private message. As for this fic, enjoy it and I hope you'll review! /End long, rambly author's note/**

Maddy sat at the edge of her daughter's bed. She had just tucked four year old Adelaide in and was getting ready to tell her a bedtime story before shutting off the lamp and leaving her to sleep. Mark was still out on patrol—he had been suckered by Dunham into working a late shift that night—so she would have to manage on her own for the time being.

"Ok, Adelaide, which story would you like?" she asked. "Would you like the one about the Three Pigs or the one about Little Red Riding Hood?" she offered up two of the girl's favorites.

Adelaide laughed. "No, Mommy! I don't want those stories!"

Maddy smiled and looked at her daughter inquisitively. "Really? Then what story do you want?" She was struggling to come up with more of the fairy tales her own mother had told her when she was young. "Maybe Cinderella? Or Sleeping Beauty—that's a good one!"

"Mommy, can you tell me the story of how you met Daddy?"

Maddy frowned a bit. "How I met Daddy? Why?"

"Because," the girl smiled, the adorable gap in her front teeth showing. "I want to know!"

"Wouldn't you rather hear the story of Jack and the Beanstalk?" Maddy asked, trying to distract the girl.

"Please?" Adelaide whined, not giving in.

Maddy heaved a sigh and smiled at her daughter. "Alright, alright," she conceded. "I'll tell you the story of Mommy and Daddy."

The girl grinned, satisfied, and settled back into her pillow, eyes wide open as her mother began.

"Well, Mommy came to Terra Nova on the tenth pilgrimage—the last full group of people to come here. Daddy had already been here for about two years and he was a soldier for Commander Taylor, just like he is now."

Adelaide nodded as she waited for her mother to continue. "When Mommy and Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Josh and Aunt Zoe came through the portal we had problems breathing. Daddy was one of the nice soldiers who helped us out." Maddy cringed a little at how childish she was making this sound, but she continued on for the benefit of her daughter. "Anyway, so after we got here, Mommy and Aunt Zoe and Uncle Josh had to go through some lessons on how to survive in the jungle. Daddy showed us how to do a lot of important things. That's how I met Daddy," she finished, hoping this would satisfy Adelaide. Of course, it didn't.

"But then what?" the child pressed. "When did you fall in love with Daddy? Was it like Sleeping Beauty or Rapunzel?" The look of sheer wonderment on the girl's face made Maddy continue.

"Well that's a long story…" she started. "You see, not long after we got here, there were some big, flying dinosaurs that came to Terra Nova. They were scary and they could hurt a lot of people. Grandpa made me and Aunt Zoe and Uncle Josh hide inside the house so the dinosaurs couldn't get us. Daddy came to make sure we were all okay, but one of the dinosaurs got into the house and tried to hurt Aunt Zoe, so Daddy scared it away and saved us." Again, this was a lot simpler-sounding than it had been, but Maddy knew if she went into detail she would lose her audience. The girl was expecting a fairytale-like love story.

"And that's when I really got to know Mark—Daddy—for who he was. And then…" Maddy grinned at the memory, "A little while later, he came up to me in the market and he said that he really liked me and that he wanted to go on a date with me."

Adelaide's tiny hands flew to her mouth and she gasped, a bright smile on her face. "Like in the fairytale stories?"

Maddy smiled. "Exactly like in the fairytale stories."

"So did you go on a date with him?"

"Of course I did—Daddy was like my Prince Charming," Maddy's eyes were bright now as she continued to draw fairytale parallels with her love life. "Daddy was very romantic and he took me to a beautiful field of dayflowers. We had a picnic lunch there, but a big rock fell from space and flew over the planet. It broke our rover, so we were trapped!"

Adelaide seemed captivated with the story's plot. "And then what happened?" she asked, spellbound.

"We couldn't make it back to Terra Nova before nighttime, so we had to cover ourselves in stinky mud so the dinosaurs wouldn't get us. And then we climbed up into a tree and stayed there because it was safe."

"You forgot the part where we kissed." Maddy looked up with a start to find her husband standing in the doorway, a small smile on his face.

"Daddy!" Adelaide cried, leaping out of bed to hug him.

"Mark, you're home! I didn't hear you come in."

"Yeah, Commander Taylor took over my shift himself so I could come home earlier." He carried his daughter back to bed, tucking her back in before kissing his wife on the cheek. "So am I interrupting a bedtime story?" he asked, seating himself beside Maddy at the edge of their daughter's bed.

"Mommy was telling me all about how you were Prince Charming!" Adelaide exclaimed.

He looked over at his wife, an eyebrow raised in an amused look. "Was she? Sounds like a good story."

Adelaide nodded then looked to her mother. "So Mommy? Then what happened after you kissed Daddy in the tree?"

Maddy turned a shade pinker at hearing her daughter mention kissing so easily. "Well Daddy kept me safe from all the dinosaurs and then he brought me back home! The end," Maddy tried again to end the tale.

"But there's gotta be more!" Adelaide whined. "What about the ball? What about the part where you think you won't see him again, but he comes back? And then after that you have a big wedding and live happily ever after."

Maddy cocked her head to one side, looking at her daughter with some amount of fascination. "How do you know all of that?"

"Every fairytale has things like that in it," Adelaide told her matter-of-factly.

Mark chuckled, drawing Maddy in closer to him. "I did take Mommy to the ball," he told her. "The Harvest Festival Ball. But I'm not a good dancer and some other things happened in between, but we danced and watched the fireworks."

"What happened in between?" Adelaide asked curiously.

"Well there was some trouble going on in Terra Nova then, and somehow Commander Taylor accidentally thought that Grandpa was involved in it, so we had to fix that problem. But it all worked out okay and I still got to dance with Mommy."

"And then comes the part where Mommy thinks she'll never see you again but then you come back to her!"

"There was a time like that," Maddy resumed control over the story. "One time a group of bad men came to Terra Nova because they wanted to steal all the trees and plants and all of the animals," she told her daughter, an exaggerated tone of darkness in her voice. "And because Daddy is a soldier, it was his job to keep us all safe from the bad men. He had to leave me behind and I didn't know if he would come back or not."

"But I did," Mark interjected, winning him a lopsided half-grin, half-scowl from his wife for interrupting her story.

"But Daddy did come back," she recalled their brief, passionate moment in the woods before her father had caught them and decided to omit this part from the fairytale. "He came back and I was very happy."

"Daddy, did you always want to make Mommy your wife?" Adelaide asked, turning to address her father.

"From the moment I met her, I knew that I wanted Mommy to be my wife," Mark replied, his eyes never leaving Maddy's face. A smile spread across her face as she pretended not to notice he was looking at her.

"So then comes the big wedding and the happily ever after!" Adelaide announced, knowing what direction the story had to head in.

"Well Daddy did propose to Mommy in the marketplace a while afterwards," Maddy told her. "And we had a big, beautiful wedding and everyone in Terra Nova came! You remember the pictures, right?" Mark projected a wedding photo that had been downloaded onto his tags to help illustrate.

Adelaide looked at the photograph for a few moments, imagining what it was like. Then she returned her attention to the story, which still needed an ending. "And then you lived happily ever after?"

"Not yet," Maddy held up a finger. "First Daddy and I found out that we were going to have a baby girl, and we named her Adelaide! Then we lived happily ever after…" she poked her daughter's nose, eliciting a giggle from the four-year old.

"I liked that story!" she declared.

"I'm glad, sweetheart, but now it's late and you need to go to sleep," Maddy kissed her daughter's forehead. "Good night."

"Good night Mommy, good night Daddy." Mark kissed Adelaide on the forehead as well before saying his good night and following Maddy out of the room, closing the door behind him.

Outside their own bedroom, he grabbed Maddy's waist, pulling her backwards. She leaned into him and he planted a heated kiss on her lips, lifting her up and spinning her around so that she was facing him. She wrapped her legs around him, her hands draped around his neck as he carried her into the room, shutting the door. "Prince Charming, huh?" he asked as she grinned against his lips.

"Of course. You're my fairytale ending," she responded as she felt his lips working over the smooth skin of her neck.

"And you," his lips traveled back up to nibble on her earlobe, "are my queen…"

**A/N: I dunno, but I kind of feel like this is the first satisfying piece of Mark/Maddy I've written in a while. I was getting frustrated with my inability to come up with new plotlines for these two. I guess all I needed was to watch the episodes again! So please leave a review and let me know what you liked and didn't like. I plan on making a series of Mark/Maddy married fics sometime in the near future so keep an eye out and message me with ideas for storylines. Thanks for reading! **


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